Mike heads off home after another big solo gig

Mike's Pith & Wind - Feeble Synchronicity
It’s spring and the air round my place is heavy with jasmine. I’ve been busy trying to tie up loose ends before we leave tomorrow on our scrappy tour of NSW and the ACT, and today I was sending off my latest batch of unspectacular posters to sundry venues. My local Chemist cum Post Office is a pretty good substitute for the official one in Camberwell Junction, as most of the time it’s not too busy and it’s open on Saturdays, which service magically evaporated a month ago in the Junction version. Such is progress. One item that my local PO lacks however, is the cardboard tube that is designed to accommodate my A3 posters, so, it being a lovely spring day and all, I determined to walk down to the Hartwell PO and purchase the one remaining tube I needed.
It’s a round walk of about 4k I s’pose, so it’s not too stressful an amble, and I was enjoying the day’s warmth with its counter-balancing southerly breeze, the birds singing etc. I passed an old man in a panama hat and a walking frame near Nazareth House, and I said hullo as I sped past him, and he said he wasn’t about to try and race me, which made me laugh.
I bought the last tube on display at the Hartwell PO and then thought I might drop in and see Peter Havery, who lives just round the corner a couple of blocks away. As I turned into his street, a rather shifty looking bloke was coming the other way carrying an identical tube to the one I was carrying. What are the odds? Mr Shifty pretended not to notice of course, but I imagined us lunging at each other with our bloated cardboard rapiers and thrusting and parrying round the surrounding sleepy streets yelling, ‘I thought of it first!’ with the read more

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Dick's Toolbox - Fool's Paradise
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us..
A number of events over the past month have lead me to dyspeptic depths that make my previous ramblings on flowers or the arts seem irrelevant and somewhat Pollyanna-ish. This came about partly because I saw the film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, and then “Two Men in a Tinnie” on television. They complement each other in demonstrating the ecological chasm we are sliding towards in our four-wheel drives in full party mode, 1000 watt sound systems playing Robbie Williams and with the air-conditioning on maximum.
Al Gore’s filmed lecture is a disturbing, well argued, statistically based argument read more